In simple terms, the ATARCA project has made it possible to incentivize and account for win-win arrangements among people, teams, and organizations in communities. As a result of this groundbreaking work, it is possible to quantify and record different contributions toward a community’s or network’s joint target. While this might sound rather abstract and even trivial, it is one of the biggest obstacles in facilitating collective action in our societies.
The benefits of such win-win arrangements –– or “anti-rivalry” as we say –– are obvious: it is rather clear that we could all be better off if we optimize our collective efforts instead of our individual actions. However, there is an apparent drawback of such collective focus, especially in the business setting: if I’m doing all the work while everyone else enjoys the benefits, I should be compensated for my work and the value I create. Such hindrances have, so far, largely constrained the collective efforts among organizations and individuals, despite the identified potential. The corporate world and market economy at large are driven by zero-sum exchange logic because we want to prevent free-riding. At the same time, there, of course, are communities and even societies which are driven by collective win-win aims, but such organizing is usually based on trust (which lacks then scale) or is based on centralized power (someone dictates the rules for collectivity). In contrast, we are interested in upscaling the “anti-rivalry” while not sacrificing the decentralization of power.
To this end, the ATARCA project has produced technology for addressing the issue: a shareable non-fungible token standard (sNFT), and related technological building blocks to take the standard to use in real-life cases. SNFT is a cryptographically secured entity for accounting individual contributions as a part of a larger whole, whether it is a community, network, or firm. While the sNFT technology indeed sits at the cutting edge of technological and scientific research, ATARCA has successfully implemented it in practical pilot use cases with people of various backgrounds and technological savviness. The cases have demonstrated that the same technological approach can be applied to both vast online communities but also to supporting local products and communities with high social impact, for example.
As a result, ATARCA has managed to address a seemingly simple but, in reality, surprisingly complex problem with a sophisticated technological solution. Yet, this solution can be implemented in an easy-to-approach manner to support different use cases and impact goals.
